What does the draft NPPF mean from a transport planning perspective?

20 Aug 24

Most NPPF briefing notes have focused on housing reform – but the transport team at Iceni is hoping the proposed changes will bring us a step closer towards the industry altering the focus from the private car to providing meaningful infrastructure to create sustainable communities. This is a result of the draft NPPF seeking to create a “vision led” approach, but what exactly does this mean and what do we think will change as a result?

It’s significant in transport policy terms, moving from the ‘predict and provide’ approach linked to car dependency. However, the vision led strategy is not anything new to Iceni Transport. We have been strong advocates of preparing vision documents / connectivity studies for years. In preparing these documents, ideally, right at the start of a project, we clearly set out how active / sustainable travel are currently viable modes for the site, but also how the development could enhance these in the future and highlight what changes are required locally to benefit the community. Essentially, helping to ‘sell’ the site, showing why it is, or could be, the right location for the development proposed, but also have a wider benefit in creating a successful environment for all. This is reflected in the NPPF consultation document itself, which states “working with residents, local planning authorities and developers to set a vision for how we want places to be, and designing the transport and behavioural interventions to help us achieve this vision”.

The proposed reforms to the NPPF will only increase the importance of these documents, and we expect highway authorities to start seeking this information at the pre-app stage rather than the current, typical focus on trip generation, junction impacts, modelling and highway mitigation.

This is reflected in another proposed NPPF change which says development should only be refused on highways grounds if there would be an unacceptable impact in “all tested scenarios”. This should mean sustainable travel measures are not add-ons to junction improvements but accepted as mitigation instead of them.

Updated guidance is promised alongside the policy changes to support the implementation, and the wording of this will be key to see how it will work in practice. We will be keeping a keen eye out for this, but in the meantime would stress the importance of undertaking connectivity studies. Should you wish to discuss this further the Iceni Transport team would be happy to assist.